Adiabatic and entropy decomposition in $P({\varphi }^I,\hspace{0.17em}{X}^{IJ})$ theories with multiple sound speeds

We consider $P({\varphi }^I,X^{IJ})$ theories of multifield inflation and ask the question of how to define the adiabatic and entropy perturbations, widely used in calculating the curvature and isocurvature power spectra, in this general context. It is found that when the field perturbations propagate with different speeds, these adiabatic and entropy modes are not generally the fundamental (most natural to canonically quantize) degrees of freedom that propagate with a single speed. The alternative fields which do propagate with a single speed are found to be a rotation in field space of the adiabatic and entropy perturbations. We show how this affects the form of the horizon-crossing power spectrum, when there is not a single “adiabatic sound speed” sourcing the curvature perturbation. Special cases of our results are discussed, including $P(X)$ theories where the adiabatic and entropy perturbations are fundamental. We finally look at physical motivations for considering multispeed models of inflation, particularly showing that disformal couplings can naturally lead to the kind of kinetic interactions which cause fields to have different sound speeds.

Figure 1

Relationships between different fields defined in this work. The $(\varphi \chi )$ basis contains the original fields appearing in the action (1). The $({\varphi }^{\prime },{\chi }^{\prime })$ basis is constructed to diagonalize the gradient term in the second-order action (2) according to (4). From this basis, we define two rotations in field space. The first of these is the entropy/adiabatic basis $(Q^{\sigma },Q^s)$ in which the angle of rotation orients the fields parallel and perpendicular to the trajectory in field space (8)–(9). The second is the fundamental basis $(Q^{\psi },Q^{\omega })$ in which the angle of rotation is chosen such that the two fields are fundamental degrees of freedom propagating with pure, independent sound speeds.